The View: Ottawa Marriott

Persistence is key, in everything you do.

I don’t know why I keep having to re-learn this lesson. Anything you want, you can probably get, if you persist at it. It might take hard work, it might take a lot of hustle, but if you’re willing to do more than the other guy, do it longer, and better and keep at it – you’ll probably get what you want.

In a way, that’s how I ended up on the roof of the Marriott Hotel in Ottawa. You may recall, a few months back, I had the opportunity to photogaph their rennovated restaurant “Spin.” I noted that the building was one of the tallest in Ottawa – so I asked if I could get on top of the roof (not the top floor, but ON the ROOF). It went back & forth a bit but the final answer then was “No.”

If I had left it at that, well, that’d be it. But I kept poking, every so often, on Twitter… talking about how awesome the sunset would look from the rooftop etc. There’s a fine balance here, I certainly could fall into the “obnxious” category, but apparently it was just a good measure of repetion that caught the attention of another local photographer, Quinn of FTWPhototography, who sweetened the pot with the promise of a large format print. POOF – roof access granted.

The right level of persistence will often reward you in life, it’s helped me and my friends get dates, free stuff, access, deals…. whatever really. Complacency is, at it’s root, mediocrity. We owe it to ourselves as creatives and photographers to push past being complacent, to be persistently better and work at getting more. Sometimes that takes form as a roof.

Have you ever been persistent about something and it’s paid off? Or what about the back-fires (I have a few of those myself). Sound-off in the comments!

You can see another Panorama I shot on the roof, with a bit about “how” on Google+, also, a larger version of this over on Flickr.

That roof is freakin' sweet. Or at least the view from it. Persistence? On TWO occasions it restored a relationship that should have just ended gracefully… you'd think I would have learned after the first one! Suffice it to say, that did not end up being the woman I'm spending my life with. Persistance also got my some undergrad grade improvements on a few papers…

Um, so yeah. AMAZING photo! No idea how you can stitch that many photos together and have it be so seamless.

Sweet photo! I learned the "ask, ask, and ask again" mantra at a women in CS conference in 2008, and the amount of awesome stuff I've got as a result is incredible. After all the worst that can happen is someone can just say no!